Ted Harvey is seeking the post of state Republican Party chair because he wants to “return authentic conservative leadership to the party structure,” he said in his announcement.

You’ve got to appreciate the audacity of the word “authentic.” The current party chair, Dick Wadhams, who announced Monday that he will not seek re-election, has only spent his entire career working for the likes of Bill Armstrong, Conrad Burns, Bill Owens, Wayne Allard and George Allen — and no, I don’t mean the coach — with nary a political moderate in the mix.

And when Wadhams wasn’t picking up a regular paycheck from one of these free-market oriented, small government officeholders, he was engineering the election of Hank Brown to the U.S. Senate, the most fiscally conservative Coloradan to sit in that body in the past few decades, or trying, unsuccessfully, to elect a conservative like Bob Schaffer to that office as well.

Or he was coordinating the upset of Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota on behalf of now-Sen. John Thune.

On Tuesday, Harvey, the Highlands Ranch senator, told me his dig about “authentic conservative leadership” wasn’t really directed at Wadhams, who had intended to run for another term until he got fed up with critics blaming him for the loss of the Senate and governor races last fall. “He got us through some of the most trying times in our party’s history,” Harvey says of Wadhams. “Having said that, many of us believe we need new leadership” that can heal party divisions and “unite our base.”

If the base splintered last fall, however, it was only in the governor’s race, where a host of “authentic” grassroots conservatives saw fit to nominate a huckster with the most threadbare credentials of any major party candidate for statewide office in decades. The alternative at the time, the plagiarist Scott McInnis, was hardly a hard-core conservative, but he was no favorite of Wadhams, either — except in that particular race.

Meanwhile, the Republican base remained loyal to Ken Buck in the Senate contest. Buck’s problem was that too many independent voters refused to support him after Democrats spent months portraying him, thanks in part to his own missteps, as a modern-day Archie Bunker.

“It disgusted me after the election when all of these pundits said the Democratic ground game pulled Democrats like (U.S. Sen. Michael) Bennet across the line,” Wadhams told me. “We had much higher Republican turnout than the Democrats — more than 100,000 more party voters even though our registration edge was only 8,000. We had a great story. How do you think Scott Gessler and Walker Stapleton defeated incumbents (for secretary of state and treasurer)?”

Wadhams has a point. Final figures from the state show 722,356 Republicans voted, as opposed to 615,119 Democrats. Gessler and Stapleton easily outpolled Buck, as did the at-large Republican regent, Steve Bosley. And the biggest vote-getter of the day was not the likeable Democrat John Hickenlooper, cruising to victory with hardly a dollar of national GOP money spent to sully his name, but Attorney General John Suthers, another Republican. No splintering among Republicans there.

Should Republicans have done better in the legislature, and especially in the state Senate? Undoubtedly, but it will be tough sledding in those races until conservatives match the independent expenditures of the left. Yet it’s not a party chair’s job to drum up so-called 527 spending, unless he’s angling for a stint in prison.

Still, Harvey is probably right that Republicans need new leadership given the distrust by so many Tea Party types to what they consider the Old Guard. “We need to embrace the free-market, lower taxes, patriot conservatives who are newly coming to our party and encourage and direct them on how to be effective,” Harvey said.

Fair enough. If Harvey wins, he could start by reminding the newcomers that Tom Tancredo and Dan Maes together failed to match Hickenlooper’s vote total, and that Buck lost in part because he spent too much of the primary pandering to some of the more controversial views on the right, such as the “fair tax” and repeal of the 17th amendment.

So hurray for party unity and fresh faces. But candidates are still going to get trounced if they can’t tack to the middle when it counts.